Right to Housing

Right to Housing: An International Perspective

The Universal Declaration of Human Rights is the seminal United Nations proclamation that lays the international foundation for human rights protections, freedoms, and entitlements, one of which is the right to adequate housing. A further affirmation of the right to adequate housing, the International Covenant on Economic, Social, and Cultural Rights, was promulgated by the United Nations General Assembly on December 16, 1966. The United Nations Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) and the United Nations Human Settlement Programme (UN-Habitat) are engaged to ensure that both the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the International Covenant on Economic, Social, and Cultural Rights are implemented and monitored by the member states.

To ensure that the member states have a thorough understanding of their obligations to implement practices that foster and promote protections with respect to the right to adequate housing, OHCHR and UN-Habitat published the Right to Adequate Housing fact sheet (2009). The fact sheet interprets and operationalizes the pronouncements on the right to adequate housing, the groups who are protected, the obligations of the member states, and the requirements for monitoring states and enforcing their accountability.

The United Nations is very clear that a right to adequate housing is not an absolute right in the sense that it does not impose unreasonable mandates on the member states. However, a right to adequate housing is nonetheless a right endowed upon all peoples regardless of class, caste, or station in life that the member states must uphold and must not abuse. For this reason, the United Nations set forth certain parameters to institutionalize what a right to adequate housing is and what it is not. In general, a right to adequate housing does not require member states to construct housing for all of its citizens, nor does it prohibit member states from engaging in economic development programs that may result in the displacement of people provided the human rights of the affected people are observed. Second, a right to adequate housing is not equivalent to a right to property because housing rights are much broader in scope than property rights. That is to say, a right to adequate housing covers not only all types of housing arrangements, including owner-occupied, rental, cooperative, shared, temporary, and informal settlements, but also it includes related human rights associated with freedoms and entitlements tied to a person's domicile. A right to property, however, being limited to formal legal ownership evidenced [Page 640]by a legal title to property, is only a subset of the broadly interpreted right to adequate housing. Finally, a right to adequate housing is not a right to land because international law does not recognize any right that requires a state to give land to people as a precondition for meeting its obligations surrounding the right to adequate housing.

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